Game of drones: As prices plummet drones are taking off
By Padraig Belton
Londoner Charles Christie-Webb runs a small estate agency out of a double-decker bus in Camden Town.
A few months ago, for £750 ($1,130; €960) he purchased a DJI Phantom drone, which carried a Go-Pro camera he could pair with his iPhone.
With some assistance from his son, Mr Christie-Webb began filming from the air the 200-odd streets where he sells properties, describing their history and styles of architecture to prospective buyers.
He is one of a growing number. Between January and October 2014, the number of organisations permitted by the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to fly drones under 20kg rose by 80%.
Hovering ahead
“The price has dropped so much in the past year,” says Roger Sollenberger of Texas drone firm 3D Robotics.
“These things were enormous, complicated, and incredibly expensive to build three years ago,” he says, “and now anyone can just buy one, for less than $1,000 (£660; €840).”
Andreas Raptopoulos, chief executive of drone firm Matternet in Silicon Valley, compares the sudden drop in price of drone technology to the rise of personal computing in the 1970s.
“We’re at a time where there are big mainframes – commercial aircraft – but also Spectrums and Commodores which people can acquire at low cost and do many things with,” he says.
“And in coming years you’re going to see the Apple-1s.”
Early business use of drone technology includes aerial photography for roof surveys, monitoring of crops, forest management, or particularly heavenly wedding photographs.
Now, not only are off-the-wall models becoming cheaper, but they are being joined by an increasing number of specialised devices.
For example, in construction, US-based Skycatch (which recently raised $13.2m of venture capital funding) is developing special drones adapted for logging, mining, and construction companies to track progress on sites.
Growing Skynet
Many of the tech sector’s best and brightest have been lured to the yard to play with drones.
Jay Bregman left his job as chief executive of Hailo in October 2014 to begin a drone start-up.
Wired editor Chris Anderson left the magazine in 2012 to found drone start-up 3D Robotics, or, as the magazine put it, “to spend more time with his robots”. He is also the man behind online forum DIYDrones.com.
